Peter Glover's "Muslim apartheid: Getting behind the veil" (pp. 18-20) and Richard Bastien's "Secularism and Islam: An unacknowledged kinship" (pp. 24) (CI., Dec. 2006).

(C.I., Dec. 2006)

I am somewhat surprised that Peter Glover ("Muslim apartheid") would throw a veil over the culture of death in the Western world when he comes to the defence of "Western democratic cohesive society" and "national Western civilization values." The fact is that this "democratic" Western civilization has reduced both the unborn child and the elderly unconscious patient to a subhuman level, and is 'liquidating' them by the millions. If this is not barbarism, I don't know what is. Are we surprised that such a holocaust breeds terrorists? As Saint Paul says, God is not mocked.

With regard to "Secularism and Islam," Richard Bastien argues that "what these two systems have in common is much more significant than what separates them," and he makes a strong case by giving five examples. Nevertheless, he misses the boat. I doubt if any of the 20th-century popes, any Catholic theologian worth his salt, or any of the great Western scholars of the religion and culture of Islam would agree.

We live in an imperfect world in which there are human and superhuman forces of evil at work, and the former are passed on from generation to generation--through Original Sin. In so far as our secularized culture ignores these realities, it is living in the dark--in a world of make-believe--and the chasm that separates this culture from a religious one such as Islam is immense, since it has lost the power of spiritual vision; the blind are leading the blind.

In so far as Islam lives by the transcendent vision of its founder--the vision of God the Creator and Judge, the Satanic Kingdom, the reality of sin and the power of prayer--it is not living in the dark. It has kept its power of spiritual vision. Therefore Christians can dialogue with Muslims, since we speak the same language to a great extent. We don't speak the same language with the secularists. We end up talking to a blank wall, or shouting the same slogans, if we lose our faith. The fact that both Christians and Muslims can pray makes all the difference in the world.

There is a wonderful passage which forms the conclusion to his article "Islamic Mysticism" (1930), by the British Catholic historian of religion and culture, Christopher Dawson, which underlines this point. Let me conclude by quoting it. "For with all its faults and weaknesses, the Sufi movement remains one of the great witnesses outside Christianity to the religious need of humanity. The Sufi is like the merchant in the Gospel who has found the pearl of great price; the Reality of God and the worthlessness and emptiness of all apart from Him--and for that truth he sacrificed every other. But that truth is so great that it suffices to outweigh a vast amount of speculative error. The Sufi held fast to this, and, consequently, in spite of his theoretic monism and pantheism, he preserves, unlike the Western philosophic monist, a genuine religious attitude. The Sufi may reason like a pantheist, but when he prays it is with the humility and adoration of a creature in the presence of his Creator; witness the prayer with which Jami concludes the preface of his Lawa'ih:

My God, my God! Save us from preoccupation with trifles and show us the realities of things as they are. Withdraw from the eyes of our understanding the veil of heedlessness, and show us everything as it truly is. Display not to us Not-Being in the guise of Being, and place not a veil of Not-Being over the beauty of Being.

Make these phenomenal forms a mirror of the effulgence of Thy Beauty, not a cause of veiling and remoteness, and cause these phantasmal pictures to become the means of our knowledge and vision, not a cause of ignorance and blindness. All our deprivation and banishment is from ourselves; leave us not with ourselves, but grant us deliverance from ourselves, and vouchsafe us knowledge of Thyself (from E.G. Browne, History of Persian literature under Tartar dominion, 1920, p. 448).

P.S. There is a striking photograph on the cover of the December 20, 2006 Catholic Register with the caption, "Pope and Mufti pray in Istanbul mosque."

Kirkland, QC

Peter Glover replies:

I am somewhat mystified by Edward King's assertion that I would "throw a veil over the culture of death in the Western world" given that I have been widely published writing against the evils of abortion and euthanasia et al. (including in this publication!).

Mr. King is quite right to express outrage over this particular flourishing (but by no means just) Western culture of sin. I am somewhat perplexed however by his assertion that "a holocaust breeds terrorists." I was under the impression that Christian teaching taught we are each responsible for our own sins. If we become murderous terrorists then we cannot hold others responsible for our choices and actions--or am I allowed to shuffle off responsibility for my sins onto the shoulders of others (except, of course, Christ)? Islamic terrorists, for instance, are born not of economic plight or poverty, as surveys reveal, but of ideological commitment to a false belief system and a determination to convert others to it by the sword or overthrow their culture and values.

Returning to what Mr. King refers to as cultural "trifles," these often turn out to be religious issues thinly disguised as cultural ones. If we do not fight these battles and see them for what they are, we may well find that our own Judeo-Christian informed values are overthrown and are no longer the prevailing values of our society.

And if I may briefly "trespass" on part two of Mr. King's letter? I was under the impression that Islam and Sufism, along with all other religions and cults generally, specifically reject Christ as God the Son, the only name by which anyone can be saved or even approach God the Father in prayer (i.e., by right of his blood)? Or have I misunderstood the Bible and two thousand years of Church teaching? We can indeed "dialogue," but not with other religions as if they were viable routes to God and his salvation in Christ.

Richard Bastien replies:

Rather than refuting the arguments on which I base my rap-prochement between Islam and secularism, the author of the letter states that Islam has "kept its spiritual vision" and quotes from Christopher Dawson's article on "Islamic Mysticism" to support his view.

The first point I would make is that "Islamic Mysticism," mainly represented by the Sufi movement, is not to be confused with the whole of Islam. It is one group among many others. There are even Muslim scholars who cast doubt over the validity of Sufism as a part of Islam. Wahabbism (also known as salafism), for example, which is the dominant movement in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Western Iraq, has no great compunction about ignoring any kind of mysticism.

The other point is that the author of the letter ignores entirely the fact that Islam is not only a religion, but a mix of religion and politics. If he has doubt about that assertion, I invite him to read the Koran, and to reflect upon the meanings of various suras, like sura 5.51, which reads as follows: "O believers, take not Jews and Christians as friends; they are friends of each other. Whosoever of you makes them his friends is one of them. Allah guides not the people of the evildoers." He might also want to reflect upon the implications of suras 9:29, 8:57, 5:37, 47:22 and the famous Verses of the Sword (suras 9:5 and 9:36). The Koran is replete with invocations to violence.

Finally, it must also be noted that the history of Muslim relations with Christians and Jews leaves little room for the kind of dialogue envisioned by the author. The claims of Muslim tolerance of Christian and Jewish minorities are largely mythical, as the history of Islamic domination in the Middle East, the Balkans and Spain makes obvious. From 716 to 1491, Christians and Jews living in what is now Spanish and Portuguese territory were tolerated only as dhimmis, subject to punitive taxes and legal discrimination. The caliph in Andalusia maintained an army of tens of thousand of Christian slaves from all over Europe, and kept a harem of captured Christian women. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, begun in the middle of the 15th-century, went on for 200 years and led to the destruction of thousands of churches and the enslavement of Jewish and Christian populations. Some scholars estimate that the Ottomans executed 11 patriarchs of Constantinople, nearly 100 bishops and several thousand priests, deacons and monks.

Viewed on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion, and its capacity for significant reform questionable at best.